A Few More Thoughts about the Sony A6300
Since I posted my initial thoughts on the A6300 last week, there's been a lot more information coming out about the upcoming camera. There are two things in particular that I missed when the announcement first came out, so I'm going to talk about them briefly now.
Autofocus with Adaptors
The A6300 has improved support for autofocus with adapted lenses. Just like the much publicised feature of the A7RII, the new A6300 has the same ability to use third party or adaptedlenses. This should provide much improved autofocus with both Sony's adaptor, and with third party Canon compatible lenses via the Metabones smart adaptor.
While this won't be as good as native lenses, it should be far more useable than it currently is. Hopefully this will go a way to help with the shortfall in native lenses for Sony's APS-C E-mount platform. I'll be very curious to see how this performs in real life applications.
Image Quality and Sample Images
The A6300 models that were available at the launch for journalists were all pre-production units and Sony wasn't allowing anyone to put a memory card into the cameras and take images with them. Since the first press conference however, Sony has shared some high resolution sample images with various sites, and the results are quite interesting.
Best Mirrorless Blogs has 18 official high resolution samples taken with the A6300 for you to look at. I've taken a good look at these, and knowing how images from the A6000 look, I can definitely see a noticable improvement in image quality.
I was skeptical that the advances in the sensor that they talked about would result in any significant differences in image quality, but from what I'm seeing with the samples, there is a clear improvement in noise handling. There's no way to know if these are straight out of the camera JPEGs however, but that is generally the way official samples are posted. If this is the case, then Sony has also dramatically improved their JPEG engine (which is currently quite poor on the A6000)
Of the sample images, one that is particularly impressive is the last shot of the two monkeys taken at ISO 3200. This is remarkably clean and detailed for ISO 3200 compared to the previous generation. On the A6000 I doubt I would get an image this clean above ISO 800 without doing significant noise reduction. Obviously it's difficult to tell at this early stage, and without trying out the camera in real world conditions, but if the results hold up to what these samples look like, then it's going to be a very impressive little camera. The one thing that has me a little skeptical, is that I can only imagine if the improvements are as good as I'm seeing, I have to believe that Sony would be touting them more, so perhaps these are just very carefully selected samples. I'm optimistic though. Time will tell I guess.
Pre-Orders
Pre-orders for the A6300 are now available at Amazon, B&H, and I'm sure most other camera stores. If you want to help out the blog by using one of the affiliate links below, please do!
Alpha a6300 Mirrorless Digital Camera (Body Only)
